The Second Generation Part 14

"I don't make rules for others," replied she. "I only say that n.o.body shall touch Hiram but us of his own blood. I won't hear to it, and the children won't hear to it. They're glad to have the chance to do a little something for him that has done everything for them."

The children thus had no opportunity to say whether they would "hear to it" or not. But Arthur privately suggested to Adelaide that she ought to try to persuade her mother. "It will make her ill, all this extra work," said he.

"Not so quickly as having some one about interfering with her,"

replied Adelaide.

"Then, too, it _looks_ so bad--so stingy and--and--old-fas.h.i.+oned," he persisted.

"Not from mother's point of view," said Adelaide quietly.

Arthur flushed. "Always putting me in the wrong," he sneered. Then, instantly ashamed of this injustice, he went on in a different tone, "I suppose this sort of thing appeals to the romantic strain in you."

"And in mother," said Del.

Whereupon they both smiled. Romantic was about the last word anyone would think of in connection with frankly practical Ellen Ranger. She would have died without hesitation, or lived in torment, for those she loved; but she would have done it in the finest, most matter-of-fact way in the world, and without a gleam of self-conscious heroics, whether of boasting or of martyr-meekness or of any other device for signaling attention to oneself. Indeed, it would not have occurred to her that she was doing anything out of the ordinary. Nor, for that matter, would she have been; for, in this world the unheroic are, more often than not, heroes, and the heroic usually most unheroic. We pa.s.s heroism by to toss our silly caps at heroics.

"There are some things, Artie, our education has been taking out of us,"

continued Del, "that I don't believe we're the better for losing. I've been thinking of those things a good deal lately, and I've come to the conclusion that there really is a rotten streak in what we've been getting there in the East--you at Harvard, I at Mrs. Spenser's Select School for Young Ladies. There are ways in which mother and father are better educated than we."

"It does irritate me," admitted Arthur, "to find myself caring so much about the _looks_ of things."

"Especially," said Adelaide, "when the people whose opinion we are afraid of are so contemptibly selfish and sn.o.bbish."

"Still mother and father are narrow-minded," insisted her brother.

"Isn't everybody, about people who don't think as they do?"

"I've not the remotest objection to their having their own views," said Arthur loftily, "so long as they don't try to enforce those views on me."

"But do they? Haven't we been let do about as we please?"

Arthur shrugged his shoulders. The discussion had led up to property again--to whether or not his father had the right to do as he pleased with his own. And upon that discussion he did not wish to reenter. He had not a doubt of the justice of his own views; but, somehow, to state them made him seem sordid and mercenary, even to himself. Being really concerned for his mother's health, as well as about "looks," he strongly urged the doctor to issue orders on the subject of a nurse. "If you demand it, mother'll yield," he said.

"But I shan't, young man," replied Schulze curtly and with a conclusive squeezing together of his homely features. "Your mother is right. She gives your father what money can't buy and skill can't replace, what has often raised the as-good-as-dead. Some day, maybe, you'll find out what that is. You think you know now, but you don't." And there the matter rested.

The large room adjoining Hiram and Ellen's bedroom was made over into a sitting room. The first morning on which he could be taken from his bed and partially dressed, Mrs. Ranger called in both the children to a.s.sist her. The three tried to conceal their feelings as they, not without physical difficulty, lifted that helpless form to the invalid's chair which Ellen wheeled close to the bedside. She herself wheeled him into the adjoining room, to the window, with strands of ivy waving in and out in the gentle breeze, with the sun bright and the birds singing, and all the world warm and vivid and gay. Hiram's cheeks were wet with tears; they saw some tremendous emotion surging up in him. He looked at Arthur, at Adelaide, back to Arthur. Evidently he was trying to say something--something which he felt must be said. His right arm trembled, made several convulsive twitches, finally succeeded in lifting his right hand the few inches to the arm of the chair.

"What is it, father?" said Ellen.

"Yes--yes--yes," burst from him in thick, straining utterances.

"Yes--yes--yes."

Mrs. Ranger wiped her eyes. "He is silent for hours," she said; "then he seems to want to say something. But when he speaks, it's only as just now. He says 'Yes--yes--yes' over and over again until his strength gives out."

The bursting of the blood vessels in his brain had torn out the nerve connection between the seat of power of speech and the vocal organs. He could think clearly, could put his thoughts into the necessary words; but when his will sent what he wished to say along his nerves toward the vocal organs, it encountered that gap, and could not cross it.

What did he wish to say? What was the message that could not get through, though he was putting his whole soul into it? At first he would begin again the struggle to speak, as soon as he had recovered from the last effort and failure; then the idea came to him that if he would h.o.a.rd strength, he might gather enough to force a pa.s.sage for the words--for he did not realize that the connection was broken, and broken forever. So, he would wait, at first for several hours, later for several days; and, when he thought himself strong enough or could no longer refrain, he would try to burst the bonds which seemed to be holding him. With his children, or his wife and children, watching him with agonized faces, he would make a struggle so violent, so resolute, that even that dead body was galvanized into a ghastly distortion of tortured life. Always in vain; always the same collapse of despair and exhaustion; the chasm between thought and speech could not be bridged. They brought everything they could think of his possibly wanting; they brought to his room everyone with whom he had ever had any sort of more than casual relations--Torrey, among scores of others. But he viewed each object and each person with the same awful despairing look, his immobile lips giving m.u.f.fled pa.s.sage to that eternal "Yes! Yes! Yes!" And at last they decided they were mistaken, that it was no particular thing he wanted, but only the natural fierce desire to break through those prison walls, invisible, translucent, intangible, worse than death.

Sorrow and anxiety and care pressed so heavily and so unceasingly upon that household for several weeks that there was no time for, no thought of, anything but Hiram. Finally, however, the law of routine mercifully rea.s.serted itself; their lives, in habit and in thought, readjusted, conformed to the new conditions, as human lives will, however chaotic has been the havoc that demolished the old routine. Then Adelaide took from her writing desk Ross's letters, which she had glanced at rather than read as they came; when she finished the rereading, or reading, she was not only as unsatisfied as when she began, but puzzled, to boot--and puzzled that she was puzzled. She read them again--it did not take long, for they were brief; even the first letter after he heard of her father's illness filled only the four sides of one sheet, and was written large and loose. "He has sent short letters," said she, "because he did not want to trouble me with long ones at this time." But, though this excuse was as plausible as most of those we invent to a.s.sist us to believe what we want to believe, it did not quite banish a certain hollow, hungry feeling, a sense of distaste for such food as the letters did provide.

She was not experienced enough to know that the expression of the countenance of a letter is telltale beyond the expression of the countenance of its writer; that the face may be controlled to lie, but never yet were satisfying and fully deceptive lies told upon paper.

Without being conscious of the action of the sly, subconscious instinct which prompted it, she began to revolve her friend, Theresa Howland, whose house party Ross was honoring with such an extraordinarily long lingering. "I hope Theresa is seeing that he has a good time," she said.

"I suppose he thinks as he says--that he'd only be in the way here.

That's a man's view! It's selfish, but who isn't selfish?"

Thus, without her being in the least aware of the process, her mind was preparing her for what was about to happen. It is a poor mind, or poorly served by its subconscious half, that is taken wholly by surprise by any blow. There are always forewarnings; and while the surface mind habitually refuses to note them, though they be clear as sunset silhouettes, the subconscious mind is not so stupid--so blind under the sweet spells of that arch-enchanter, vanity.

At last Ross came, but without sending Adelaide word. His telegram to his mother gave just time for a trap to meet him at the station. As he was ascending the broad, stone approaches of the main entrance to the house at Point Helen, she appeared in the doorway, her face really beautiful with mother-pride. For Janet she cared as it is the duty of parent to care for child; Ross she loved. It was not mere maternal imagination that made her so proud of him; he was a distinguished and attractive figure of the kind that dominates the crowds at football games, polo and tennis matches, summer resort dances, and all those events which gather together the youth of our prosperous cla.s.ses. Of the medium height, with a strong look about the shoulders, with sufficiently, though not aggressively, positive features and a clear skin, with gray-green eyes, good teeth, and a pleasing expression, he had an excellent natural basis on which to build himself into a particularly engaging and plausible type of fas.h.i.+onable gentleman. He was in traveling tweeds of p.r.o.nounced plaid which, however, he carried off without vulgarity. His trousers were rolled high, after the fas.h.i.+on of the day, to show dark red socks of the same color as his tie and of a shade harmonious to the stripe in the pattern of s.h.i.+rt and suit and to the stones in his cuff links. He looked clean, with the cleanness of a tree after the measureless drenching of a storm; he had a careless, easy air, which completely concealed his a.s.siduous and self-complacent self-consciousness. He embraced his mother with enthusiasm.

"How well you look!" he exclaimed; then, with a glance round, "How well _everything_ looks!"

His mother held tightly to his arm as they went into the house; she seemed elder sister rather than mother, and he delighted her by telling her so--omitting the qualifying adjective before the sister.

"But you're not a bit glad to see me," he went on. "I believe you don't want me to come."

"I'm just a little cross with you for not answering my letters,"

replied she.

"How is Del?" he asked, and for an instant he looked embarra.s.sed and curiously ashamed of himself.

"Adelaide is very well," was her reply in a constrained voice.

"I couldn't stay away any longer," said he. "It was tiresome up at Windrift."

He saw her disappointment, and a smile flitted over his face which returned and remained when she said: "I thought you were finding Theresa Howland interesting."

"Oh, you did?" was his smiling reply. "And why?"

"Then you have come because you were bored?" she said, evading.

"And to see you and Adelaide. I must telephone her right away."

It seemed to be secretly amusing him to note how downcast she was by this enthusiasm for Adelaide. "I shouldn't be too eager," counseled she. "A man ought never to show eagerness with a woman. Let the women make the advances, Ross. They'll do it fast enough--when they find that they must."

"Not the young ones," said Ross. "Especially not those that have choice of many men."

"But no woman has choice of many men," replied she. "She wants the best, and when _you're_ in her horizon, you're the best, always."

Ross, being in the privacy of his own family, gave himself the pleasure of showing that he rather thought so himself. But he said: "Nonsense. If I listened to your partiality, I'd be making a fearful a.s.s of myself most of the time."

"Well--don't let Adelaide see that you're eager," persisted his mother subtly. "She's very good-looking and knows it and I'm afraid she's getting an exaggerated notion of her own value. She feels _so_ certain of you."

"Of course she does," said Ross, and his mother saw that he was unmoved by her adroit thrust at his vanity.

"It isn't in human nature to value what one feels sure of."

"But she _is_ sure of me," said Ross, and while he spoke with emphasis, neither his tone nor his look was quite sincere. "We're engaged, you know."

"A boy and girl affair. But nothing really settled."